Walking on Eggshells

the relationship between the shadow QW & KC

My favorite way to approach the court cards is to understand them through relationship with each other, primarily as elemental pairs. I’ve explored this concept briefly in these posts here and here, and have taught about it in online workshops, but the bulk of the work I’d like to take book form at some point (please lend me energetic support for that endeavor! I’m intimidated and avoidant.)

Anyway, the idea is this: each court card is double-elemented, assigned one element via rank, and one via suit. This means that we can pair them off. Page of Swords, for example, is Earth+Air (Page=Earth, Sword=Air), and so is Knight of Pentacles (Knight=Air, Pentacles=Earth). If we explore the relationship between these two cards, we can find myriad ways that they offer one another mutual support. It plays out beautifully throughout the court.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the pair of Queen of Wands and King of Cups (both Water+Fire), and today I got a real life lesson in how the shadow of those energies can play out.

So, I share custody of my daughters with my ex husband, from whom I had a very contentious divorce in 2016-17. He spent years texting-bombing me about how terrible I was, comparing me to Hitler (!) etc. It’s calmed way way down in recent years, to the point where I no longer get anxious diarrhea when he texts me, so: progress!

But he remains someone around whom you have to walk on eggshells, and I know this because of the way my girls behave. They love their father dearly, but they also edit themselves around him. They don’t want him to know certain things, they especially don’t want to ask for things. They don’t want to be too much.

Today’s a Saturday, and my oldest daughter has really been enjoying this bible study we’ve been going to once a month at our church (a very liberal and progressive United Methodist church), and this month it falls on her dad’s weekend. She said she wanted to go tomorrow, and of course I told her I’d happily pick her up and bring her along. But she wanted me to text her dad about it. I did.

He texted back: “She said it was your idea. Which is a problem. Don’t try that again.”

I, of course, filled with a cold rage. How dare he? But also, I was filled with sadness that my daughter can’t be honest about what she wants.

I pulled out the cards to help me process and ground the energy running through me. I asked, “Why did she deny wanting to go to church tomorrow?”. I mean, I know why, but sometimes we just want the cards to describe it for us, right? And I wasn’t surprised at all to draw King of Cups reversed.

King of Cups, when it’s in shadow, is someone who cannot deal with their own emotions. They are unable to process their own grief, their own rage, their own anything. They numb themselves with drink, they become remote. They may put on a show; after all, anyone can incorporate therapy buzzwords into their vocabulary and sound pretty enlightened. But it’s all surface level for this shadow King. They are not an emotionally safe space, and it doesn’t take long to figure that out. They are brittle, an emotional ticking-time bomb.

And so my daughter, faced with King of Cups reversed, becomes a shadow Queen of Wands. Queen of Wands is about our appetite and desires. This Queen is hungry for life, confident and unafraid to say what they want. This energy is threatening to the shadow King of Cups. Any woman who’s been in a relationship with a fragile cis-man knows this dynamic. They can’t deal with their own shit, and they resent the Queen of Wands for wanting more.

The shadow Queen swallows this resentment. They take on responsibility for the shadow King’s fragility, and turn down the volume on their energy, deny their own appetites. They step softly, they pretend to be satisfied with less and less and less. They don’t want to set the King off, they don’t want to make the King feel bad, because the King can’t handle feeling bad, can’t handle feeling anything!

It’s terrible that my daughter is in this position of having to pretend to not want something, because of a man’s fragility. But this is a tale as old as time. I’m sure everyone reading this is or has been caught up in this dance at some point. And to be clear, the shadow King of Cups isn’t a villain. They aren’t bad people, just very sad people, without the tools or support to face their own hearts, to feel the depths of their own grief.

Photo by Art Institute of Chicago on Unsplash

And the shadow Queens aren’t the victims here. By staying quiet and complacent, they give the King implicit permission to keep numbing out, to keep quietly festering in their own juices. They don’t challenge the King, and the shadow King of Cups will not self-motivate to do their work.

(To be clear, I’m not placing blame on my young daughter for this dynamic. I’m speaking more generally here. And yes, she’s in therapy and has been for years)

The courage to feel grief and rage—the grief and rage of long-repressed desires, of feelings long denied: that is what we must summon in these cards. There is so much resentment and fear in the shadows here. It is not easy work. There is the threat of violence here, and abandonment. That is real. These are powerful archetypes, and their shadows can be truly dangerous.

We are in a time when the fragility of people who cannot face their own feelings–not just men–is literally threatening us all. Not to diverge too much, but for example….the climate crisis? Most of us cannot bear to face that grief, so we numb out. And because we cannot confront the grief, we cannot access the holy rage that can exist in Queen of Wands, the rage that can purify and clarify and make real change possible.

As I write this, I realize that in many ways, my entire life has been a long lesson in the shadows of these energies. Growing up with a numbed out, alcoholic father with a mother who shut down her own longing for a more expansive and fulfilling life; spending years as a bulimic in relationships with men who had the emotional maturity of a toadstool; using cheap sex as a substitute for real intimacy; abandoning my creative self because I could not bear the raw emotion that art demands.

The dance between these two archetypes takes many forms, and I hope to continue to explore them in writing. For now, I hope that these initial musings serve as an entry point for you to mull over your own relationship with this King and Queen. If you’re willing to share in the comments, I’d love to hear about how they show up for you.

Here are a couple little spreads to get you started:

I pretend that I don’t want this

So that I can avoid feeling this

*

Grant me the courage to embrace this sacred rage

Grant me the courage to face this holy grief